Messy Business (Pt 2)
Background * Episode (must be logged into Patreon to view) Episode Description Citywide Film Festival 8.30pm Slot, Friday The Still Synopsis: When winter came, my friend brought me a list of parts to buy, from hardware stores he knew. I had a truck. He had a little cash. He worked in Countinghouse, and passing through, I’d park the truck and pick up this or that. A heavy pot, a stand, some copper pipes. He stayed the night. I woke before the dawn, and poached an egg. I brought it back to bed. “I didn’t know you cooked,” he said, and then he pointed past my shoulder through the glass. The sun was rising, up above the hill. That evening in the woods, we built the still. Opening Narration Specialist Courson, start record. Article intake file #8421. Object: Blough City Lot #92-dash-338. A collection of photographic equipment, okay! Description: Let’s see… start with a walnut-coloured leather gear bag — with a shoulder strap and a stainless steel clasp, nice. Includes one camera, brown and silver, two lenses, a pair of binoculars, also brown and silver. Additional accessories seem to be from some sort of… portable dark room? Yeah… Each piece besides the developmental equipment includes a carrying case. Condition: Mixed. Camera shows heavy use, damage to leather and metal. But it is operational. Lenses are in excellent and near-mint condition. Binoculars, likewise in good shape. Accessories are… a grab bag, sell them as-is. Price? For the lot, let’s say 400 to start with, 15-20 incremental. 650 up front, minimum. Actually, you know what? You know what, put an asterisk on that. Let me just, set up the machine to— Yeah, okay. Ah, comments and analysis: Where to begin with a lot like this? I mean… I guess I should start with the weirdest thing: the dark room. It’s… it’s weird. It’s like a little portable desk with containers for the chemicals, and a tiny bath basin for the film to develop in. This is some real ‘prosumer’ shit. But let me tell you, this right here? This is a nice camera! It has a sort of a retro aesthetic, like a lot of things in Blough City. Look for buyers with a penchant for the classics. Additional lenses are smartly chosen for surveillance work, which means it might take some massaging if you’re trying to sell to a bird watcher or something, but it’s not beyond your abilities, Momona. Binocs are solid too. Some fingerprints, a little oil on the metal, but the lenses are crystal clear. A real sense of presence when you look through ‘em. And that is just the mundane stuff. I got curious when I read this was found out on some suburban rooftop in the Thicket near the, uh… the Blake Blossom scene? You read about that? Tricky stuff. So I thought maybe this was connected — I did a spectrographic scan, ran a quick membretic analysis, and it turns out this stuff didn’t belong to a private dick. This is Concern tech, friendo. This could ID outsiders, Peels, even other business folks like us. So, you sell to a normie, start at 400, 650 up front. But if you have a cross-towner on the hook? Bump that up exponentially. Or, chuck it. Sometimes it’s better for rare goods to leave circulation. Plot Cast * Austin Walker (GM) * Ali Acampora (Chris Andrews/Agent Rider) * Keith J Carberry (Agent Heard/Robber Twig) * Janine Hawkins (Maggie Darcy/Agent Seals) * Jack de Quidt (Florence Slowly/Agent Page) Other Characters * Courson (intro) * Blake Blossom * Gale Green * Mike Truk * Hector Hu (mentioned) * Leslie Strata/Agent Ward (mentioned) Of the main player characters, only Agent Heard is new. Christine Andrews and Florence Slowly were first introduced in There Is No Greater Love, and Maggie Darcy is first seen in A Bowling Alley, A Boxer, and A Bird. Gale Green is from When Justice Is Done, and Blake Blossom and Hector Hu are both from There Is No Greater Love.